visitors

Facebook is continuing to shed U.S. visitors

A recent report from analyst firm ComScore said that unique U.S. visitors to Facebook (FB) dropped slightly in May compared with April and March. But an analysis of additional ComScore data suggests that the slowdown could be more significant and longer lasting. Falling traffic could be a concern to investors, who justify Facebook's high market value by pointing to its growth potential.

Unique visitors are an important measure of growth and activity for social networks and an indicator of whether users might be tiring of a site. According to Reuters, research firm ComScore said that the number of … Read more

Pinterest sees user base double in three months

Interest in Pinterest is skyrocketing.

Launched a little more than two years ago, the social photo-sharing service has doubled its number of daily unique visitors to 4 million since January, according to new data from social media marketer Tamba. The site's core users are women, age 25 to 54, but the site is attracting the interest of men, who now make up 28 percent of new members compared with 20 percent in January.

More money is also being associated with the site, according to Tamba. The percentage of social media-driven revenue that comes from Pinterest has grown from 1 … Read more

Facebook's Timeline spells success for apps

A couple of months ago, most people had no idea what Viddy was. Since getting its start in April 2011, this app -- which is like Instagram but for video -- tallied 60,000 monthly active users. Then, in February, Viddy launched its Facebook Timeline app and it's been smooth sailing ever since.

Now Viddy has more than 1.7 million monthly active users and averages about 300,000 new registered users per day. Since its Timeline launch, there have been more than 15 million interactions with Viddy content on Facebook. Also, for the first time ever, it's … Read more

Google hits record with 1 billion site visitors in May

One billion people worldwide visited Google in May, the first time ever that a site has drawn that many visitors in one month, according to data from ComScore.

The number of unique visitors to Google's sites rose by 8.4 percent from 931 million a year ago to just over a billion--1,009,699,000 to be more exact.

Across the world, market researcher ComScore said yesterday, Google saw its greatest numbers in India and South Africa, which accounted for 14.3 percent and 13.5 percent of its visitors, respectively. The lowest numbers were in South Korea and … Read more

ComScore's gift to Web sites: (Almost) free traffic

AllThingsD

Hey, Web publishers! Want to boost your traffic overnight? Talk to ComScore, which is handing out millions of unique visitors.

The Web's dominant traffic counter is in the midst of overhauling its traffic counting system, in response to years of complaints from publishers who insist that their traffic has been undercounted.

Turns out, they were often right.

ComScore's old data, for instance, says the Huffington Post attracted 9.95 million unique visitors in December. But its new numbers peg HuffPo's December traffic at 20 million uniques.

The difference is that ComScore's old system tracked small panels … Read more

A post-redesign AOL hits new Web site traffic records

AOL announced on Friday that it posted double-digit growth in March, posting new traffic records for the former high-flying Internet darling.

Page views on AOL's programming sites jumped 35 percent in March, compared to a year ago, while unique visitors rose 11 percent, to 56.5 million users, in the same comparison period, according to ComScore Media Metrix.

"Our strong growth is a direct result of rebuilding each and every one of our vertical Web sites over the past 12 months, with the goal of providing consumers highly relevant and rich experiences that focus on key passion points,&… Read more

Inside two toolkits helping Chinese hackers

Two toolkits designed to help ordinary people participate in denial-of-service attacks against Western media have surfaced on the Internet, according to one researcher.

In a blog Tuesday, Jose Nazario of Arbor Networks says one of the toolkits is easier to use than the other though both are designed for "the masses." This isn't new, and toolkits such as these have been created for other political protests in the past.

AntiCNN.exe was the first of the two tools found on the Internet. Nazario reports that it opens a flood of HTTP connections and attempts to hurt the … Read more

CNN.com survives random outages

Although CNN escaped a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack planned for Saturday, the site has experienced either random outages or inflated response times over the last 72 hours, according to one Internet research company.

Netcraft reported Tuesday that during a three-hour period on Sunday morning, the CNN.com site was unavailable from its listening post in Pennsylvania. And on Monday, the site experienced inflated response times. CNN.com did suffer a minor DDoS last Thursday, but recovered by limiting access from certain geographic areas, mainly Asia.

Also on Tuesday, The Dark Visitor, a site that tracks Chinese hackers, said a downloadable … Read more

Cyberprotests planned in support of China

Several groups of Internet organizers plan to show on Saturday that they can mobilize patriotic Chinese Internet users and wield their influence worldwide against what they say is anti-Chinese media in the Western world.

The Dark Visitor, a site that tracks the activities of Chinese computer hackers, is reporting that a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on CNN.com is planned for 8 p.m. Beijing time, or 5 a.m. PT in the United States.

But the organizers themselves (Google translated page) appear to be waffling, and Jose Nazario of Arbor Networks reports that there has been little preattack activityRead more